[PDF] Mobilization Factionalization And Destruction Of Mass Movements In The Cultural Revolution eBook
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Based on a unique survey of Chinese respondents, the authors find that participation in social movements during the Cultural Revolution was motivated by the desire to improve social status or maintain existing positions in the social hierarchy. A strong relationship is noted between factional alignment and family background in provinces immersed in class-based struggle; however, the association becomes nil in provinces where sectarian struggle was grounded in class. The authors assert that the social conflict school has failed to adequately examine sectarian internecine fights among rebels in attempts to explain the mass movements, while the political process school has ignored fundamental social conflicts embedded in Chinese society. Potential pitfalls likely to confront future mass movements are identified.
Based on a unique survey of Chinese respondents, the authors find that participation in social movements during the Cultural Revolution was motivated by the desire to improve social status or maintain existing positions in the social hierarchy. A strong relationship is noted between factional alignment and family background in provinces immersed in class-based struggle; however, the association becomes nil in provinces where sectarian struggle was grounded in class. The authors assert that the social conflict school has failed to adequately examine sectarian internecine fights among rebels in attempts to explain the mass movements, while the political process school has ignored fundamental social conflicts embedded in Chinese society. Potential pitfalls likely to confront future mass movements are identified.
Using a social movement perspective, this monograph demonstrates the differences between the Return to the City Movement by the Chinese educated youths - the only successful social movement by the Chinese people since the establishment of the communist regime - and the Down to the Countryside Campaign by the Chinese Communist Party. Grounded in data collected via an unprecedented survey research effort involving respondents who lived through these historic events, the monograph explores the emotional impact upon the educated youths of being forced to the countryside, the directions and forms of their resettlement, work, income, mentality, marriage/love, and relationship with local peasants while in the countryside, timelines and methods involved in returning to the city, their final occupations, children’s fulfillment, current perceptions of urban life, evaluation of the campaign and their experiences in the countryside. The authors also summarize the lessons learned from the Return to the City Movement, providing references for Chinese social movements in the future.
*Includes pictures *Includes Mao's quotes and accounts from Chinese living through it *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another." - Mao "[The Cultural Revolution was] responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic." - The Communist Party's description of the Cultural Revolution in 1981, five years after Mao's death. It's a sure sign of fame when a man is known simply by his first name, and Mao Zedong, often referred to simply as Mao or Chairman Mao, was one of the most influential men of the 20th century. He was also arguably the most controversial; as the founder of the People's Republic of China, Mao rose from being a communist revolutionary to successfully overthrowing a regime and transforming China into a communist powerhouse in Asia. The ramifications of Mao's life and legacy are still very much felt today, as China continues to transition into a superpower that may soon lay claim to the world's largest economy. Mao's communist revolution is still controversial, but it was his reign over China that has made him notorious, and in the West he is often considered one of history's biggest tyrants. Mao's revolution and his subsequent policies have been accused of causing millions of deaths, possibly more than the likes of Hitler and Stalin. It has been roughly estimated that Mao was responsible for the deaths of anywhere from 40-70 million, but he has plenty of defenders as well, and they cite Mao's military and political leadership for inspiring similar revolutions across the world. When the Great Leap failed, he was outmaneuvered by experts in the party who went on to restore the more gradualist approach of the first Five-Year Plan. In the subsequent years, without an active governing role, Mao concluded that the gains of the revolution could be lost if China simply came under the grip of a new governing elite. He decided that the only way to instill a proper revolutionary fervor in the country's youth was to enlist them to wage a permanent war on the vestiges of "bourgeois culture" in China. It was against this backdrop that Mao announced the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Unlike the revolution that brought the communists to power by using armed struggle to gain political power, this new revolution was to be waged at the level of everyday life, carried out by common citizens against fellow citizens suspected of "rightist" tendencies. The vanguard of the movement was the volunteer "Red Guard," a citizen army of young people who wore red armbands and called out those they suspected of counterrevolutionary tendencies. The Cultural Revolution became a war of all against all. Students attacked and revolted against their teachers, young people exposed their parents as "rightists," urban intellectuals were forced to go to the countryside and work on farms, and Communist Party officials were publicly shamed in front of large crowds. Thousands and possibly even millions were killed or driven to suicide, among them Mao's intraparty rivals, Liu Shaoqi and Peng Dehuai. The Red Guard had as one of their tenets a fierce devotion to Mao, and they required that the Chairman's portrait be displayed in every household and on every street corner. Elements of traditional Chinese culture, including architecture, art, music, and literature, were rooted out and destroyed by the Red Guard in its fervent effort to cleanse communist culture of the relics of the past.
Raised to be "flowers of the nation," the first generation born after the founding of the People's Republic of China was united in its political outlook and at first embraced the Cultural Revolution of 1966, but then split into warring factions. Investigating the causes of this fracture, Guobin Yang argues that Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 to 1968, enacting a political mythology that encouraged violence as a way to prove one's revolutionary credentials. This same competitive dynamic would later turn the Red Guard against the communist government. Throughout the 1970s, the majority of Red Guard youth were sent to work in rural villages, where they developed an appreciation for the values of ordinary life. From this experience, an underground cultural movement was born. Rejecting idolatry, these relocated revolutionaries developed a new form of resistance that signaled a new era of enlightenment, culminating in the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s and the Tiananmen protest of 1989. Yang's final chapter on the politics of history and memory argues that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized along these lines of political division, formed fifty years before.
International scholars and sinologists discuss culture, economic growth, social change, political processes, and foreign influences in China since the earliest pre-dynastic period.
"Tsou, one of the country's senior and most widely respected China scholars, has for more than a generation been producing timely and deeply informed essays on Chinese politics as it develops. Eight of these (from a wide variety of sources) are gathered here with a substantial new introduction. Tsou considers events not simply from the point of view of a widely read political scientist (even political philosopher) and a concerned Chinese, but also in the light of history, the dynamics of Marxism-Leninism, individual personalities, and humane realism."—Charles W. Hayford, Library Journal
Thirty years ago, China was emerging from one of the most traumatic periods in its history. The Chinese people had been ravaged by long years of domestic struggle, terrible famine and economic and political isolation. Today, China has the world's second largest economy and is a major player in global diplomacy. This volume, written by some of the leading experts in the field, tracks China's extraordinary transformation from the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the death of Chairman Mao, to its dynamic rise as a superpower in the twenty-first century. The latest edition of the book includes a new introduction and a seventh chapter which focuses on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping, the godfather of China's transformation, under his successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
Mao Zedong envisioned a great struggle to "wreak havoc under the heaven" when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. But as radicalized Chinese youth rose up against Party officials, events quickly slipped from the government's grasp, and rebellion took on a life of its own. Turmoil became a reality in a way the Great Leader had not foreseen. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins recaptures these formative moments from the perspective of the disenfranchised and disobedient rebels Mao unleashed and later betrayed. The Cultural Revolution began as a "revolution from above," and Mao had only a tenuous relationship with the Red Guard students and workers who responded to his call. Yet it was these young rebels at the grassroots who advanced the Cultural Revolution's more radical possibilities, Yiching Wu argues, and who not only acted for themselves but also transgressed Maoism by critically reflecting on broader issues concerning Chinese socialism. As China's state machinery broke down and the institutional foundations of the PRC were threatened, Mao resolved to suppress the crisis. Leaving out in the cold the very activists who had taken its transformative promise seriously, the Cultural Revolution devoured its children and exhausted its political energy. The mass demobilizations of 1968-69, Wu shows, were the starting point of a series of crisis-coping maneuvers to contain and neutralize dissent, producing immense changes in Chinese society a decade later.